Hilary Chappell, LI Ming and Alain Peyraube China Possesses Rich Linguistic Resources Which Remain

TYPOLOGY IN CHINA: THE STATE OF THE ART (Pre-publication version) Hilary Chappell, LI Ming and Alain Peyraube∗ 1. INTRODUCTION China possesses rich linguistic resources which remain relatively untapped : the 10 main Sinitic languages or dialect groups account for roughly 93% of the population (Mandarin, Jin, Xiang, Gan, Hui, Wu, Min, Kejia,Yue and Pinghua); the remaining 7% comprise the many different ‘minority’ languages in long term contact with Sinitic such as Tibeto-Burman, Mongolian, Hmong and Tai. In an almost unprecedented state of affairs, written records for Chinese extend without a break 3,000 years into the past, furnishing a rich documentation for any kind of historical study. These factors essentially create an ideal situation for carrying out typology from both synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. Nonetheless, the long-standing tradition in research on language and its relationship to literature in China has meant that very little attention has been directed towards other language families, let alone the dialects of Chinese. This emphasis on ancient versus modern studies, and standard Mandarin versus the other dialect groups in the Sinitic taxon, has led to the situation where the search for linguistic universals on the basis of crosslinguistic work has seen very little development. Even in the many dialect descriptions available, the largest parts of such grammars are devoted to phonology.1 Despite this, during the 1980s, interest in the work of Greenberg and linguistic typology was aroused in linguistic circles in China.2 It is edifying to briefly digress and compare the ways in which the two domains of diachronic linguistics and typology were differently linked in China as opposed to the west – that is, specifically Europe and the USA. While in the west, the new élan in typology set off a revival in the study of diachronic syntax, seen particularly in the renaissance of studies into grammaticalization, the opposite trend took place in China. After the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in the late1970s, scholars began to work in earnest again on historical syntax, notably Liu Jian and Jiang Lansheng, at the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. It was thus only in the 1980s that typology began to take off, on the basis of the new research into historical syntax, when linguists such as Zhu Dexi 朱德熙, took up the challenge in a decisive way to use dialect material in order to make typological comparisons. The most important work by Zhu Dexi were his articles of (1980) and (1985): the first examines the use of the highly polysemous subordinating particle de 的 in Beijing Mandarin, and its counterparts in Cantonese (Yue), the Wenshui dialect (Jin) ∗ The authors, listed in alphabetical order, are affiliated to: (1) Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France (Chappell); (2) Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing (Li); (3) Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, EHESS, Paris and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France (Peyraube). 1 and the Fuzhou dialect (Min), while the second treats the use of the two main types of Yes/No interrogative structures in Sinitic languages with either the form VP-NEG-VP or Adv-VP. This inspired further exceptional scholarship in the same domain by Zhang Min (1990), a comprehensive work on interrogative structures in Chinese languages, and Anne Yue-Hashimoto (1991a) on stratification of the different interrogative structures found in the Min dialects. In this discussion, we provide an overview of the theoretical developments in Chinese linguistics for typology, mainly for the last 10 years. The subjects we treat are those of word order, topic-prominence and syntactic topics, word categories, verb complementation and verb frames, and the relation of diachrony to typology in terms of grammaticalization studies. We conclude with a brief discussion of future challenges and a description of current projects on typology in Chinese linguistics. 2. WORD ORDER 2.1. Word order change The majority of Sinitic languages present a perplexing case for syntactic typology since they display in general head-final characteristics for their NP structure but a mixture of head-initial and head-final ordering for their VPs (though see §2 below on the dominant word order in Wu and Min languages). Thus, standard Mandarin and other Sinitic languages pose somewhat of a challenge: they do not conform to either of the two main alignments, as Dryer (2003), among others, has observed. Table 1 illustrates the incompatibilities in the case of standard Mandarin: Table 1 : The perplexing case of Mandarin : a typologically hybrid language HEAD-FINAL STRUCTURES HEAD-INITIAL STRUCTURES consonant with SOV order consonant with SVO order Adjective – Noun Verb – Object Numeral – Classifier – Noun Auxiliary – Verb Demonstrative – Classifier – Noun Verb – Modifying adverbial complements of manner, result and degree Relative Clause – Noun Preposition – NP Genitive – Noun Complementizer – S Adverb – Verb Intensifier – Adjective Standard of comparison – Adjective Prepositional Phrase – Verb Exception : A subset of locative constructions take the form Verb – Prepositional Phrase This problem has also contributed to the controversial debate on the basic order of constituents in Chinese languages which began in the 1970s. Although the main issue has been to determine whether Modern Chinese has basic SOV or basic SVO word order, this was necessarily linked up with the possibility of word order change 2 from SVO to SOV. Note that in this context ‘Chinese’ means ‘Mandarin Chinese’. Certain scholars upheld such a diachronic change (Li and Thompson 1975, 1976; Huang 1978; Tai 1973, 1976) while others made the counterclaim that Mandarin, if not Chinese as a whole, has always been, and remains, SVO (Light 1979, Mei 1980, Sun et Givon 1985, Wang 2005 inter alia). Furthermore, researchers set out to identify these word order preferences on the basis of the documented history of the language and the use of quantified data for the syntactic constructions in question. The debate slowly took on larger dimensions, extending to the basic word order of proto-Sinitic and even to that of proto-Sino-Tibetan and its relation to proto-Sinitic (Dryer 2003). First, we take a brief look at studies from early historical periods of Chinese, then at the word order debate for contemporary Chinese. The controversial issue for reconstruction regards prehistory and the possibility that Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages have evolved from an ancestral SOV language. The debate in Chinese linguistics began with the status of Archaic Chinese (11th – 3rd century BCE), shown to be a non-rigid SVO language, given the conditioned appearance of pronominal DOs in preverbal position. This in turn led to the enticing question of whether the SOV pronominal order could be the residue of an even more ancient SOV word order. Let us first consider the rules allowing SOV order in Archaic Chinese: these are much clearer than in later periods and include (i) interrogative pronouns as DOs preceding the verb in questions (with few exceptions), (ii) a tendency for personal pronouns as DOs to precede the verb in negated sentences (however, there are many exceptions to this rule), (iii) the demonstrative pronoun shi4 是, as DO, being preposed before the verb. Similarly, DO nouns taking the focus markers wei2 唯- and/or shi4 -是 are preposed. This is summarized in the Diagram 1 below. interrogative pronoun SUBJECT OBJECT = personal pronoun [+negated S] VERB demonstrative pronoun wei2 唯-/shi4 -是 FOCUS noun Diagram 1: SOV order in Archaic Chinese Yu Min俞敏（1981, Liu Danqing刘丹青(2004) and other scholars believe that this atypical SOV order in Archaic Chinese could be a vestige of the actual word order in proto-Sino-Tibetan. Matisoff (2003), LaPolla (1994) and many other Tibeto-Burman scholars cited in these two works, are all of the view that the common ancestor of Sino-Tibetan must be SOV, given that contemporary Tibeto-Burman 3 languages remain SOV, apart from Karenic and some of the Bai languages which are SVO3. More recently, Dryer (2003) takes up this standpoint with some interesting and subtle additions of argumentation. He maintains too that proto-Sino-Tibetan was OV while proto-Chinese was probably VO. In his approach however, the change from OV to VO has not yet been fully realised since Chinese preserves its head-final characteristics in the noun phrase, a feature regularly correlated with OV ordering. His explanation for the synchronic situation mainly refers to Mandarin Chinese and is as follows : Mandarin has retained its head-final characteristics from the proto-language, particularly nominal modifiers including RelN and GenN, under the pressure of Altaic languages to the North with which it forms a linguistic area. The correlation between OV and modifier-modified orderings appears to be an Asian areal feature, characteristic of the language families found in North Asia but also and interestingly, the Tibeto-Burman languages of the Western Tibetic group in contact with Indo-Iranian. In the case of RelN, this correlation does not hold for all the OV languages in the world, which can be associated with either ordering in fact (Dryer 1992).4 His explanation would thus appear to support the much-debated Altaicization hypothesis put forward in one of the earliest typological approaches of the Greenberg era concerning the Sinitic taxon, that of Hashimoto (1976, 1986), a hypothesis which still remains to be proven (see also §6.4. below). The important contribution of Dryer is to link up the debate on phylogeny, and diachronic change in word order with areal typology and correlations concerning linguistic universals. Nonetheless, several aspects still need to be resolved with Dryer’s hypothesis, for example, regarding the existence, and extent of intensive contact between speakers of proto-Sinitic and proto-Altaic in prehistoric times, a precondition for Sinitic to have retained its SOV features.

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